HandHeld Focus Stacking in Macro Photography

in this video I will show you how I do my handheld focus stacking out in the wild [Music] hello my next your wood and welcome to this video in the last video I talked about the basics of focus stacking and in this video I will show you how i do my handheld focus stacking on live subjects so I need to address the elephant that's in the room here and that is the gear there in all my videos I say that when you want to get started in macro photography gear is not important and I still stand by that you can take the basic equipment and get started in macro photography however focus stacking is more of an advanced technique and for this technique the gear does matter there's two things I want to point out here that is the frame rate of your camera that's four frames per second that you can take on burst mode and an image stabilized lens or sensor so I'm currently holding my Canon 650 day and unfortunately I don't stack with this camera because the frames per second is too slow in the ATD that currently filming that has a higher frame per second when in continuous shooting I always use that camera for focus stacking so every image is seen in this video has been taken on the Canon a two day Ondra shooting the 650d has a demonstration the reason this is important is the frames per second is frames per second it means how many frames the camera can capture within one second the highly frame rate the better your chances are of getting a good photo stuck and the second thing is an image stabilized lens or sensor this means that you can go a little bit lower on your shutter speed and still get a sharp result there another reason I focus stack as well is in conditions like this where the Sun is just going down the insects are starting to calm down I can't get away with an f-16 on my f-stop so focus stacking allows me to open up my aperture get more light increase my shutter speed but the same time still get a whole insect in so now we have the technical stuff out of the way let's get down to the actual focus stacking itself so another one focus stacking I'm setting my camera to Ivy and selecting my f-stop the desktop I'm going to be using will be anything between F 4 and F 8 depending on the lighting situation again I'm using an image stabilized lens I can get away with having a higher f-stop the why do you f-stop the more images you're going to have to take to get a full stack the most important part here is to set your camera into continuous shooting we are on manual focus and exactly the same as we did in the studio I'm gonna focus just in front of the insect now we're gonna pretend as an insect here because there isn't one I'm just using it in demonstration purposes but we're gonna file because just in front of the insect orders I will press the shutter button our burst will start and as it bursts I will move forward with the camera to cover the whole subject you can see there that's why you need a higher frames per second the higher frame per second the more chance you'll get of getting your shot one of the main reasons why a stack don't work is because the insects or the bush flower and it's on is moving in the wind this is some of that's unavoidable again a higher FPS on your camera can limit that mistakes but if your insect is moving around on the bush like these bumble bees here then you're not going to get a successful stuck this is we're coming out in the mornings or in the evening is beneficial because the temperature is lower and your insects are less active giving you a much higher chance of getting a successful stack and that's the easy part the easy part is taking the pictures once you've set your camera you just go around and you just take pictures of everything you find the magic happens in the computer and that's what we need to do now we need to take these pictures into the computer and take a look but for me I've got to take the a to do now and capture some more focused acting tips so again just to recap you put the camera into continuous mode you've focus up the forms of your subject press and hold the shutter button and just move the camera in to get your stacks so you can see here at the end of each stack you can see there's a picture of my hand that shows me where the stock begins and ends and I'm able to select all those images and put them into a stack or the stack file is just something that Lightroom can do just to indicate that they're all stacked images but the only shows one full Mouse a little bit better for organization as you can imagine sorting out these stacks which work which don't has taken quite a while because I did take over a big 2,000 images so I've cut all that out because there's no need for you to go through that boredom these are the ones that I have selected and I'll select them for a few reasons some of them work some of them down and explain why okay so we have our damselfly one just here we come to the develop so you can see it better this one you're familiar with on do first it's just touch on the subject of moving subjects and if your stack doesn't work now this is form a bumblebee and the stack didn't work on this occasion because he's foraging around and I'm still able to get a good capture on a single frame of the image and what I can do now is I can just select one of my presets let's go with give it that one there we go okay and our lives Logan laws are not too bad we can easily recover those noise levels in Lightroom because see there how you're not at a disadvantage by attempting a step because you can still get that single frame where the eyes in focus okay so we all know that if a subjects moving it's not going to make for a good stack what I want to do is I want to show you something now where the subject appears to not be moving however the stack won't work because it did move okay so I have this whole fly here we have five images in this stack I'm just going to right click editing and open as layers in Photoshop and this is one of those instances where the stack doesn't work and I want to show you this first before we get onto the editing of the image where the stacks do work so we have our farm fly here I'm just going to turn off all the layers and you see there how I am handheld because that's why it's moving around so much okay I found our shop can compensate for that right easily what we don't want is if we look here is this image here everything is out of focus so when you go through your stacks you've always got a couple of images where everything is out of focus you want to remove those before you start your stack we're going to remove that one okay I select all my layers come to edit bought our line layers again vignette removal is contact geometric distortion is on ticked as well but on automatic oh click OK now Photoshop has a line in that image so we can go through here lock but it can already say from that one how the fly has already moved okay I'm gonna show you what happens when we stack this now let's come to auto blend layers stacked images seamless tones and colors content-aware fill transparent areas exactly the same as we did on the last video ok nothing has changed on the settings so I'm first inspection probably thinking wow that looks good the whole flow is in focus however there's a few issues a start of check out the wing just there that's completely failed and when he's faced there okay first of all I look at the wing you could say there how the wing moved in between some of the images and that's resulted in that and here you can see how he's headers moved although I chopped some a good job here we got a little bit of a problem just there you see there and indeed you can go in there and edit this and we cover it what you can do is choose which layer you like and just mask out that particular layer and keep it I'm not going to do that in this video because honestly it will take what a long time but you can do that to recover it okay so I'll just load up another image of a pop fly here and I want to show you another example of some things that can mess up your stack so first of all we do the same again I'm going to come down or click the bottom layer and see what we have it's blurred that's our start layer next one is blue that's another start layer and this is where we start coming into focusing on the end of the wing then we come to the middle part of his ring and they're not days head and then finally some of his legs an antenna and the antenna is what I want to talk about because these antennae are constantly moving okay and they Khafre a stack however you can recover it using photoshop okay so you can see here Aries antenna I have completely messed up however the rest of him looks okay now this is an easy fix all we need to do is ID which layers we want to keep and on this picture we want to keep this antenna here possibly this one okay so what we're going to do there is we need to ID the layer so there's one layer just there grab a black brush and we will mask of that out there we go that's the same for this one here okay we want this liar here to be gone to get rid of that as well let the go okay so I'll topple that I'm going to create a new layer but we're going to put that above this layer here okay except I must areas just there let's just get rid of that we don't need those there we go and on all new layer I'm going to call this edits we're going to grab we're going to grab the healing brush tool make a shiver on all layers and click the alt key define the area where the clouds are going to come from and then we can just paint it in and you're always bear cloning from quite close to where you're fixing big see there how we've just done that quite quickly and easily I can now do the same here and we are going to get areas where it's not going to work bear in mind I am doing this very quickly okay but that's how you can easily fix and 10a problems because they're constantly going up and down the antenna you are on these bugs and they will fill out your stack but if you see someone like that don't fly the stack away because you can fix it let's deal with the ones you've come here to see and that is the damselfly image but click on this number here that will unload our stack so they can see exactly what's in it and we come through here you'll be able to see the stack and you can see it's handheld and the weight moving around okay and I would say this is the image you would use if you're just doing one frame that's probably the image that I would use okay so let's take these into Photoshop now exactly sounds before editing open as layers in Photoshop more this is loading into Photoshop it's a good time to talk about software although I'm using Photoshop you don't after there's a lot of focus stacking software they said they're serene Stucker is one example Helicon focus is another one there's also some free ones as well I'm going to link those in the description of this video for you to take a look at now if you do a lot of focus stacking which I don't I need to declare that I don't do that much focus stacking okay cause it drives the computer mad okay if you do do a lot that I would recommend you get one of the dedicated soft because they do work brilliantly okay so we are done we are in Photoshop now I'm just going to check this bottom one which hey hey you know there you go so you can see the some hairs that are in focus there so I'm going to leave that one there they see the noise levels as well we could fix all of that later we'll do that in Lightroom okay so I'm going to reflect all the layers edit Auto align layers click OK and again it's exactly the same as we've done before I'm probably beating myself now and you might begin to be bored ok so we are now aligned you can see that from the corners again edit auto our blend layers and we go in to blend those into a 1 stacked image so what we're stuck in if we're stacking 20 images that were handheld using the Canon a 2d which is recording right now fantastic camera and I'll be disappointed I can't physically show you how I do this out in the field because of the limitation to the 650d so I'm considering getting a second Canon a 2d so if I can start showing you focus stacking out in the field okay so we are almost act there we go ok so you can see here now we have our finished stack and I'll quite happy with that there is some issues that need fixing some of these little dots here that will require taking out these hairs here I'm not too happy about because they look like them don't belong to the damselfly and of course we have issues around the edges here there those will get fixed through cropping the image so I'm just going to show you now a quick retouch on this stack now so let's deal with this area here ok now just in case you can't see what I'm talking about let me just highlight it for you so we have in here an area just there okay where the damselflies hairs haven't quite come out we also have a little area here that's will give me a little bit if I just zoom out you can see there oh it's standing gay so what we can do is again same as we did last time I'm just going to bring this up a bit so I could see my stacks Malaya's and I'm going to look for the layer where those particular hairs are on that's going to be at the back somewhere isn't it because that's where that was okay yep it's the last one okay there I'm going to grab a black blush but I'm just going to brush that out well then turn the layers back on that's some point we have to select the layer that we want to replace it with and went to select this one look over those colors okay put these back on you can see there how that just looks a lot better because it's not standing out now for this part here I'm not too sure what that is I'll be honest we did he move did he not move I don't know so I'm going to find in fact we don't need to find it that layer there what we can do let's grab our brush and just paint that part on top go so let's spring up a layer which we don't need you can go away we don't need that layer and I'm going to put a new layer on for edits this is the layer we're going to go in and fix all the local issues honestly the hairs we fixed they were filled in this space in the middle here but it does have a bit of an issue of a sharp edge so I'm just going to go in there and we will try let's try the healing spot brush first and all we want to do is just get rid of that sharp edge I didn't do a good job it's try a bigger brush nope so when that doesn't work just switch over to the clone tool now I define a sauce we're going to do from there and then line that up just go over it okay it's looking a little bit better you have an issue just here with our stuck we want to fix that up a little bit possibly do that blew it a little bit just a little bit that's all we need because more view will look sorry they don't know you've edited it there so they're not gonna be looking for it you know it's there because you've edited okay so next ice clinics where's little dots edit let's click once now you can go through and clean up all of that if you want to I'm not going to because the video will be way too long so the final step now is to crop it and do some color grading so I'm going to take my crop tool and we're going to crop for Instagram so we're going to do a 5 by 4 ok bring it up a little bit I want my in fact I'm going to go 4 by 5 ok bit bitter now I want the damselflies eyes roughly where the rule of thirds is and another point that I didn't make out in the field is with the ATD I have more megapixels so with the A to D I can crop in a lot more and get away with it that I can with the 650d know a bonus of shooting macro and the A to D the more megapixels the better but still narrow it to this stage you fixed everything that's bugging you about it we're ready for color grading and for that I'm going to take it into Lightroom I'm going to go to file save as I'm going to create a new folder called edits I'll call it done but damselfly click Save we're going to discard layers and click OK now coming back into Lightroom I'm going to come to my library select my images for word I'm just going to synchronize this this will pick up that new folder that we've just created okay there's our edit folder there's our damselfly ok so this next part is going to be a bit of an anti-climax because all I do now is just select one of my presets right there just the this is the cellar spider which are created to photograph cela spiders which I've never published because they didn't turn out very good but anyway that's the preset I used here and you can see there every a damselfly image so that's it that's how I created my 20 image handheld photo stack of a damselfly give it a go because at the end of day it's digital you're not gonna lose no money by giving it a go and as I said with the bumble bee image there's you've always got that one image that you can use I hope you got something from this video I really hope that I've conveyed how I did it because of not being able to use the ATD to physically show you that's something I might look into the future to remedy bug it in a second day-to-day that way I can actually start showing you focus that can get in the field and also macro videography out in the field I hope you enjoy this video give me a like if you did let me know in the comments what you thought of it when I was sealed wood and as always I'll see you on the next video so every bit so the higher your flying mate the more chance is your heart so now we have the technical cars this f-stop can be anywhere between F 4 and F 8 depending on the lighting conditions and again the line conditions there will be different yeah lapse again a higher what I call this is we're coming out in the morning or wait until the evening when they flutter I want my own today off Alain the mood for photographing you this technique is also useful for being able to lower your nothing lava in this video I'm going to show you how I can trigger my own feet back again take 36 in this video I'm going to show you how I do my handheld focus tutting so while this is loading in Photoshop it's a good opportunity to talk about software now I'm currently using Photoshop there are many other photo [Music]

Channel: Stewart Wood

Views: 59,252

Rating: 4.9495535 out of 5

Keywords: focus stacking, depth of field, macro photography, HandHeld Focus Stacking in Macro Photography, Hand held focus stacking in macro photography, image stacking, how to, macro photography tips and tricks, macro photography tutorial, focus stacking in photoshop cc, insect photography, insect photography lens, damselfly, damselfly photos, canon, stewart wood, editing focus stacking, photography, Helicon Focus, Zerene Stacker, how to focus stack, outdoor photography

Id: HowcTTo3vfY

Length: 23min 49sec (1429 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 31 2019